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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

One instance of this might be "running a performance-intensive game fullscreen on one virtual desktop while having a browser open to read strategy guides on another virtual desktop". This is a common use case for me that also seems to be the first place where performance starts to diminish.

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That's probably a lot to do with two instances of virtual desktops running, though.

Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though.

Streaming would be a better example.

If you have "a browser" open, sure, if by "a browser" you mean a single browser tab on a not-resource-intensive page or with Javascript disabled. If by "a browser" you mean the dozens of tabs and half-dozen browser plugins the typical user is actually running, though...well, there's a reason Chrome comes with its own process monitor.

But "strategy guides" are in the former category, aren't they?

And for reference all my background tabs in chrome are using plenty of memory but <1% CPU total. It helps that the browser has aggressive throttling for background tabs.

Edit: it's even more aggressive than I thought https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...

I dunno what to say, man. It's a real problem that I've run into.

I believe you had performance issues caused by chrome. What I'm wondering is whether all three of the following apply:

1. The problem was caused by Chrome actively spending CPU and memory cycles, not just having so much memory allocated you run low, because NUMA itself can't change memory consumption.

Caveat: It's possible the NUMA setting would also cause Chrome's ram use to be capped. If that's causes an improvement, then you could do the same capping on a non-NUMA machine.

2. The foreground page in chrome was something like a strategy guide, not something more intense like video streaming. Are there pages that are both strategy guides and intensive to calculate?

3. This happened in the last year or so since version 57 came out.

I switched back from Chrome to Safari (for totally unrelated reasons) between the last time I had this problem and the current time. Maybe Chrome is better about throttling background tabs these days (and better than Safari). Also, this time, wikis and strategy pages seem to load fine (though noticeably slower), but it's a little too hard for me to order a pizza on Grubhub, especially if I'm context switching back and forth between the browser and the game. All I can actually say with confidence is that I have run into a performance bottleneck well before hitting the single-thread will-it-run-at-all barrier.

>Having a browser open uses approximately 0% CPU though.

Not on the modern web it doesn't. A lot of pages are continuously running background tasks and refreshing over time.

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